Brickbat: Dig This
Two weeks after burying her husband last year, Pat Baker, 80, got a phone call from the contractor building a patio at their Goderich, Ontario, home. Workers had uncovered a skull. Police quickly figured out that the skull was about 130 years old, not a recent murder victim. But that triggered a provincial law requiring Baker to have an archaeological assessment of her property, at her own expense. It took more than a year and cost almost $70,000 to complete the study and repair all the damage to her yard from the dig. Fortunately, the study found nothing of archaeological significance. The bad news is that provincial law required her to properly bury the skull the contractor had found, at her own expense.